The Hacker News — Cyber Security, Hacking, Technology News

The Dutch hacker, who in 2013 was accused of launching the biggest cyberattack to date against the anti-spam group Spamhaus, escaped prison Monday even after he was sentenced to nearly 8 months in jail because most of his term was suspended.

Sven Olaf Kamphuis, 39, was arrested in April 2013 by Spanish authorities in Barcelona based on a European arrest warrant for launching massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against Spamhaus that peaked at over 300 Gbps.

Spamhaus is a non-profit group based in Geneva and London that tracks spam and cyber-related threats, creates blacklists of those sites and then sells them to Internet Service Providers.

However, the DDoS attacks on the company were so sustained that put "the proper functioning of the Internet at risk and thus the interests of many individuals, businesses and institutions," said the court.

Kamphuis was initially sentenced to a total of 240 days, but he has already served 55 days in on remand after his extradition from Spain in 2013 to the Netherlands. Therefore, the judges suspended his remaining 185 days sentence, Dutch news reports.

So, Kamphuis is not going to spend any time behind bars.

Kamphuis was sentenced for not only carrying out DDoS attack against Spamhaus but also its partners in the United States, U.K., and the Netherlands. Besides this, he even hacked into an IP address as well as taking part in a criminal organization.

Kamphuis was eventually extradited to the Netherlands where he was in custody for two months in May 2013.

Kamphuis' lawyers said the British teenager, who used the hacker alias "Narko," was the only one responsible for the attack.

At the time, Spamhaus blamed the Dutch hosting company called CyberBunker for the 2013 DDoS attack, which came just after the company blacklisted CyberBunker.

Microsoft has released its own custom distribution of FreeBSD 10.3 as a "ready-made" Virtual Machine image in order to make the operating system available directly from the Azure Marketplace.

FreeBSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) is an open source Unix-like advanced computer operating system used to power modern servers, desktops as well as embedded systems.

Until now, the only way for Azure customers to run FreeBSD was to make use of a custom image from outside of Azure (from the FreeBSD Foundation).

However, the new release makes it easier for Azure users to launch FreeBSD directly from the Azure Marketplace and get official support from Microsoft whenever necessary.

Why is it so important for FreeBSD to run on Azure?

According to the company, it’s important for FreeBSD to run in Azure because many top-tier virtual appliance vendors develop their products on the operating system.

However, the key reason for building, testing, releasing and maintaining its own FreeBSD 10.3 image is to ensure its users have an enterprise service level agreement (SLA) for their "FreeBSD VMs running in Azure," says Jason Anderson, Principal PM Manager at Microsoft's Open Source Technology Center.

As shown in the image, just click on the +New on the Azure Marketplace tile on your dashboard, Type "FreeBSD 10.3" in the text search box, and here you are.

He also added that Microsoft did so to remove "burden" from the FreeBSD Foundation that fully relies on community contributions.

"We will continue to partner closely with the [FreeBSD] Foundation as we make further investments in FreeBSD on Hyper-V and Azure," Anderson said, as well as add "new Hyper-V features – stay tuned for more information on this!"

The company has previously worked on supporting FreeBSD on Hyper-V as a virtual machine that was aimed at ensuring software appliance partners' kit functioned smoothly in Azure that makes use of Hyper-V.